I will show you how to use Spring Boot framework to quickly create RESTful web service that can receive JSON requests and send commands to Arduino. The aim is to control a servo and relay based gun turret such as this one:

Click here to get an idea of how such turret operates. The video shows a prototype based on ASG pistol. Don't worry, my aim is quite peaceful: I want to build paintball gun turret :)

I will not discuss any electronics setup or Arduino code in this post. Take a look at the articles linked above to see information about PC-Arduino communication, controlling servos and building relay based circuit... I assume that you know what Spring Boot is, but advanced knowledge is not required to follow this post.

Full code of the project is available on GitHub (includes both Java application and Arduino sketch)...

The easiest way to create basic working Spring Boot project is to use Spring Initializr. I started my project by filling the form like this:

Note that Gradle is used to create (fat) Jar package, Java 1.8 is used and the only required dependency is Web. This setup will produce an application running on Tomcat Embedded so there's no need for installing any web server. The app has support for REST controllers so we will be able to handle JSON based communication in a clean way with very little effort...

Without further ado, here is the piece of code responsible for receiving messages from clients:

TurretController class has @RestController annotation and a public method marked with @RequestMapping. The mapping specifies that executeTurretAction method should be invoked whenever a client makes a POST request to .../turret/execute URL. Any HTTP client capable of sending POST with Content-Type="application/json" can communicate with such Spring controller method. It can be some desktop application or a simple HTML page with a bit of jQuery for example. I was using Postman Chrome App to prepare requests. In the next post I will describe how to communicate with such controller from smartphone that runs PhoneGap/AngularJS based application...

If everything goes well, this kind of data will be sent back to client:

{
"id": 19,
"message": "Command sent :)"
}

You don't have to do anything special to make this happen. Spring chooses HttpMessageConverter implementation to create response in a format that is expected by the client. Another nice feature of our @RestController is the error handling. Let's say that client provides invalid value of tilt angle - this is what is sent back as response:

@Component annotation is there to show Spring that ArduinoConnection is a bean and as such Spring should take care of its lifecycle and usage as dependency. By default Spring creates beans in singleton scope. This is fine for us - we only need one such object. connect method is marked with @PostConstruct. This makes the method an initialization callback that gets invoked when ArduinoConnection object is created (it will happen when application is started). @PreDestroy is used on disconnect method to make sure that connection to serial port is released when the program is closed.

controlTurret method is the piece of code that is responsible for sending gun turret action request to Arduino. That method is used in TurretController.executeTurretAction, remember? it uses instance of NRSerialPort to communicate over serial port (gnu.io.NRSerialPort package makes it possible). It comes formNeuronRobotics/nrjavaserial library which is a fork of RXTX that greatly simplifies serial port access. nrjavaserial takes care of loading proper native library needed to access the port (it worked well on my Windows 7 x64). As stated before, I'm not going to discuss Arduino communication and microcontroller code in this post. I will just note that you don't have to worry about casting int to byte while message array is created. It's sad but Java doesn't have unsigned bytes so it will show (byte)MESSAGE_SEPARATOR (which is 255) as -1 while debugging, but a correct value will go over wire to Arduino. Take a look at this screen shot from Free Device Monitoring Studio (you can use this tool to check what data is sent to Arduino through serial port):

Let's get back to ArduinoConnection class: portName and baudRate properties are marked with @Value annotations. This way it is very easy to take the settings from configuration file. All you have to do is to create a file named application.properties in /src/main/resources directory and values will be automatically loaded from config. Here's the content of application.properties file:

Apart from aforementioned settings for Arduino, there are two other elements, namely: sever.address and server.port. By default Spring Boot runs the application on localhost:8080. I've changed this to custom settings to make it easy to access the application from devices connected to my WiFi network... Accessing TurretController from such devices is the reason why I added following CorsFilter class to the project:

Thanks to this Cross-Origin Resource Sharing filter it's easy to make ajax calls to executeTurretAction method without using some trickery like JSONP to circumvent same-origin policy restrictions.

And that's it! All interesting elements of the Java web app were discussed. Full code is accessible on GitHub. Since this is Gradle based project, running it is as easy as typing gradlew run. I've included Gradle Wrapper in the repo so you don't even need to have Gradle installed...